Design in Tech Report

The full PDF’s on the report site, with audio from the SXSW presentation on March 12th on SoundCloud. The audio’s on Vimeo with slides, too (below).

Of note…

Top business schools are including a lot more design (thinking) classes, driven by market demand. That’s good for designers.

Computational designers, in particular, are in demand (I’d not heard of the job title, and this is a good read that’s unrelated to the report: The Unnecessary Fragmentation of Design Jobs). These are the designers that big business (Facebook, Google, Amazon) are looking for. Computational design was pioneered by four women, Gillian Crampton-Smith, Joy Mountford, and the late Murial Cooper and Red Burns.

Designer communities (not that there are too many) are in demand. This year DeviantArt was acquired by Wix, and Dribbble was acquired by Tiny. It was back in 2012 when Behance was acquired by Adobe.

27% of the internet is powered by WordPress.

Creativity comes from difference.

China has 500,000 design graduates every year. What’s happening there is very advanced.

8 of the top 10 smartphone apps are owned by Facebook or Google. You think you have choice, but you don’t.

There’s no mention of VR, but it’ll be included next year. A big addition, I expect.

I must read the 2016 report, State of the Digital Nation, by Jules Ehrhardt.